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for years. Max appeared to be giving them simple instruction: how to bank and
how to create drag. They had whistled in the woods, and they whistled now.
"Chhee-rup. Chhee-rup.
At first I hadn't gotten it. Now I understood that the whistling was a way for
Icarus to see.
"Chhee-rup." Together the children flew across a deep, scary ravine. They
circled and formed a figure eight in the air. I couldn't catch my breath as I
watched them perform.
Max called out, "I'm right here, Ic."
Icarus whistled, then he spoke. His voice echoed through the night air.
"I feel you. I feel you moving in the air!"
And although it was a little too dark to clearly see his face, I could swear
that Icarus was grinning his little fool head off.
Chapter 88
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I CUPPED MY HANDS together and called out clearly and loudly to Max, "Time to
come down. Okay, Max? Right now."
To my relief, she waggled her wings and gave crisp orders for her tiny
squadron to land. One after the other they did land, small feet smacking the
dirt floor, accompanied by squeals of laughter and the purest delight that
only children seem able to feel and display.
Actually, I felt guilty about giving them orders, knowing how discipline had
always been instilled into them. But it had to be done. We still weren't safe
in these woods. Not even close. Men with guns would be coming soon, if they
weren't already nearby.
I hugged them all, and even Pip was delirious with happiness. But there was no
time to savor the astonishing event.
The air was cooling down fast, as it does in the mountains at the end of the
summer. Kit didn't want to make a fire and he was right, unfortunately. It
would be a lot safer without one. But a whole lot colder.
We found a reasonably protected place in the lee of a couple of large
boulders. We pitched away loose stones and twigs and cleared a flat place for
sleeping.
We gathered piles of leaves and loose wood to use for warmth during the night.
The kids wrapped their wings around and were insulated.
"We'll be in a better place tomorrow," I told the children. "Maybe at my
house." And maybe not.
"You promise?" said Oz. I wanted to promise him pancakes with syrup and all
the milk he could drink. I wanted to promise him a real bed without bars and a
happy-everafter life. But I had no idea what the next twenty minutes would
bring.
"Go to sleep," I told them. I put my hand on Oz's head. "Sweet dreams, okay?"
Oz gave me a cynical little smirk, and I couldn't blame him. I'd made him a
wish, not a promise. I stood over him as he joined the huddle of bird-kids.
They were scratched and bruised and I didn't have so much as a bandage. I
didn't even have a ragged blanket to throw over them.
I bit my lips to stop them from trembling when Max began the Lord's Prayer.
The others joined in and added names to the list of those God was to bless. I
didn't recognize any of the names-except for Mrs. Beattie's - didn't know
whether they were animal or human, living or dead. There was so much history
about the children I didn't know yet.
Max said, "And God bless Frannie and Kit, our good friends. And God bless
little Pip, too, our four-legged friend."
Who had taught the children to pray in the midst of that depravity?
Was it Mrs. Beattie's influence? Was it instinct? I wondered if God was
listening to the prayers? These special children needed Him, were under His
protection. It was a knotty philosophical problemand better left to
theologians.
Once the others were sleeping, Max came and sat with Kit and me. Kit asked her
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for the fiftieth time about the School. Who, he wanted to know, were the
people who worked there? Max still referred to the people as them. She was
afraid about the School in general. She had been conditioned for years not to
breathe a word.
Kit kept pushing her, coaxing her.
"They'll put us to sleep," she finally said. "They're not fooling around."
"How do you know that, Max?" I asked. I was hoping, praying, that she'd tell
me a hokey bogeyman story; some Dr. Frankenstein version of "Wait till your
daddy gets home."
"They kill the skitters in jars." She looked straight at me when she said it.
Her face was a mask of total seriousness and truth. She turned pale.
"And they have a kill jar for each of us."
My breath caught hard. I knew about kill jars. They were containers filled
with carbon monoxide. Kill jars were used to euthanatize lab mice after they'd
served their purpose in research labs.
"But they wouldn't put children like you to sleep," I said to her.
"Yes, they sure would put children like me to sleep," Max said. Her eyes were
small and hard. "They always put the rejects to sleep." Her voice was barely
audible, as if she were talking to herself.
"Eve was put to sleep. And so was Adam... and, I think, so was my brother,
Matthew."
Chapter 89
I SAT BRACED UP against one of the boulders and tried to let some of the shell
shock wear off. I don't swear too much, but I was thinking holy shit, holy
shit, holy shit. What a mind-boggling day. I realized that my heart hadn't
stopped pounding for the past several hours. I felt raw, used up, and
incredibly tired. I knew I badly needed to sleep.
And yet I couldn't get my eyes to shut. My eyelids weren't functioning as they
should. I was breaking down.
I was also heartsick and stunned by Max's earlier pronouncement children like
her had regularly been put to death.
They always put the rejects to sleep, she'd said. They did it as standard
operating procedure.
Adam was put to sleep. So was Eve.
But who were these children with the auspicious-sounding names?
Why had they been killed? What caused them to be rejected?
Kit came and sat down beside me. He looked exhausted and worried and I
couldn't blame him. "I've got a confession to make," he said in a hoarse
whisper. "I have to get this out in the open."
I wasn't expecting that. Not right now. "Confession about what?" I stared at
him. My stomach had already dropped a couple of notches. I didn't need any
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"confessions," but there was no way he could take back his words.
"Will you stop reading my eyes?" he said.
"I'm not. Okay, I am. I'll try not to. Talk. What is it that you have to say
to me?"
He sat cross-legged, facing me. He considered, weighed, then finally spoke.
"A few weeks ago, a geneticist was killed in his bedroom in San Francisco. So
was his live-in girlfriend. It was brutal and bloody. It was made to look like
a burglary gone wrong. It wasn't, though. This geneticist," he went on, "had
helped to discover a 'promoter gene.' The promoter gene was probably used at
the School."
I knew that promoter genes enable genetic material to be transferred from one
organism to another. The promoter acts kind of like a key, opening a DNA lock,
but it's not an all-purpose skeleton key. Different promoter genes are [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]